


LoGH and Fascism: What Do They See In It?

by imahira



Category: Ginga Eiyuu Densetsu | Legend of the Galactic Heroes
Genre: Canon - OAV/OVA, Criticism, Embedded Images, Essays, Gen, Meta, Originally Posted Elsewhere
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-27
Updated: 2019-06-29
Packaged: 2020-05-30 19:09:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,918
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19409575
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imahira/pseuds/imahira
Summary: Archive of some thoughts I've posted previously on the reception and misappropriation ofLegend of the Galactic Heroes. Content warnings include racism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and, well, fascism.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> These essays presume some familiarity with manifestations of online fascism and of the history of fascist terminology like "degenerate".

Background information for those who are blissfully unaware: LOGH is a popular anime among internet fascists, who interpret it as a fascist text. Phezzan is seen as a metaphor for Jews, and the Earth cult as a stand-in for either Islam (its religious nature, its ties with terrorism, the robe-like outfits of the cultists) or Judaism again (its religious nature, the desire to return all humans to Earth as analogy for Zionism). This is not a blanket condemnation of the series, which I think is quite good, and in fact is a work that tries to condemn the autocratic side more than even progressive fans ever acknowledge.

And, well, what argument do we have against the fascist interpretation of Phezzan? I can't see one. Phezzan is so easy to read as an anti-Semitic analogy that I've come to believe it's fully intended to be one. Phezzan is a small, unaffiliated nation that profits off the wars between the Empire and FPA to the point that it's actively engineering more wars. It has roots in the Empire's media. All of this is textbook anti-Semitic imagery. I've seen even progressive fans of the series say that Phezzan are the real bad guys for manipulating the Empire into bad actions--the Empire being, well, an imperialistic nation with a massive military and a history of state-sponsored eugenics, run by an autocratic government. Are we really to believe that such a nation needs to be goaded into antagonism towards the FPA?

(The Earth cult is a harder sell to me; the depiction is so cartoonish and generalized that it could be read as a metaphor for any group the viewer sees as irrational. Their religious beliefs don't really map onto religious Zionism, since they want all humanity, not just a select few, to return to using Earth as a religious and cultural base. The fascist desire to map Islam onto them also fails, in my opinion, since it's based extensively on 21st century Islamophobia, in which terrorism is inextricably linked to Muslims. Legend of the Galactic Heroes is not a work written in the 21st century, nor was it written by someone viewing terrorism through that kind of Westernized framework.

It's very conceivable to me that Tanaka and the makers of the OVA would have encountered historical anti-Semitic views in the process of researching European history, whereas the Earth cult doesn't really invoke any imagery specific to Islamophobia. As a Jewish person I'm much more up on my anti-Semitic dogwhistles and might have missed something, but in any case, the Earth cult is _treated_ as a metaphor for Islam or Zionism by fascist viewers, regardless of how reasonable that interpretation may be.)

* * *

_[four-tweet thread from 9/7/18:]_

hey if you see that vaguely credited logh "fandub" around, it's a shitty nazi production, please let it fester and die thx ✌️ 

notice that the characterization of fezzan in canon as the war-profiteering middle men lets them use 'phezzani' as a codeword for 'jew'

[nsfw] https://i.gyazo.com/f6244f0cf1b0eb36fd62e83fb626ef44.png … and the in-universe history books tie in very closely to the nazi fixation on 'degeneracy' and 'loose morals' leading to a crisis for humanity that only fascism can heal. even though the narrative *condemns* rudolf's takeover on these grounds...

the nazi audience doesn't care about that condemnation and tries to sell logh as something in line with their ideals, because for all the condemnation, the narrative also presents reinhard etc. as well-meaning/capable

* * *

_[twitter thread from 6/21/18:]_

actually another of my hot takes is that logh *attempts* to show the impact of imperial rule on the common man--but it weighs so heavily towards humanizing and fleshing out reinhard and the admirals that the appropriate focus is impossible

we get so much of reinhard trying his best to be A Good Kaiser--not like the bad ones!--and the admirals fucking around being personally noble or petty dumbasses, that it is QUITE EASY for reactionaries to point to logh as something showing the good side of fascism!

this intense focus on them Trying Their Best to do the right thing, and only a few short looks at the negative consequences, can't co-exist with any genuine condemnation of their failures

i glanced at the logh tag on tumblr a few days ago and rolled my eyes at a 4chn screencap saying "fuck oberstein" with a caption saying oberstein is so fascist even /pol/ hates him--but you know what? that's a successful portrayal of a fascist!

he's NOT likable enough that we privilege his successes or his good intentions over the billions of people he hurts! he's off-putting and not personally engaging  
  
and while he's interesting and we actually know plenty about his motivations, we see him acting like fascists actually have to: he's completely detached from the war and bombing and death.

the narrative doesn't moon around over how sad he is when people get hurt, or how much he loves his family while he's being an imperialist. the audience doesn't like him enough to excuse anything. *(tho i understand the novels have a little elaboration on his family situation)

and that's how you portray a fascist successfully. nazis have never latched onto 'the producers', not because it goes into depth about how evil they are and the consequences of that (they don't care about that! they don't think those things are bad!) but because they AREN'T COOL

some audiences, of course, accept out of hand that billions of deaths are bad, just as writers don't need to take the time to make us sympathize with a dog or a child that gets killed by a fleshed-out villain--it's extreme enough to be an automatic reaction

but if most of the consequences of a fascist regime are offscreen mentions of millions or billions of deaths, or maybe 30 seconds of a 24 minute episode... even an anti-fascist audience will remember less of that than they do of the empire's individual reactions to it

on the fpa side you have falk, trunicht, windsor--all ridiculous and unlikable. but they manage to obstruct the "good guys" on that side. other forces have to step in and take care of them. democracy is how they stay in power & the good guys can't use it to maneuver around them.

but on the imperial side, all the ridiculous/unlikable people standing in opposition to reinhard... are swept away by reinhard personally. autocracy *gives* him the power to dispose of them, and he represents defeat of all unpleasant aspects of 'his' system, in a way yang can't.

bad leaders are presented as a constant result of democracy functioning as it should, while reinhard's assumption of power basically fixes autocracy. his admirals are frowned on narratively for failing during colonialist battles (wittenfeld)...

...or committing treason against his authority (the various attempted assassins and later ****). the only unpunished challenge to autocracy is reinhard's against the nobles and the goldenbaum dynasty.

after that he IS autocracy, and however much damage he causes, his judgment and his intentions are better than the electorate of the fpa. yang's speeches condemning autocracy just can't stand up to the weight of how much we're supposed to enjoy and sympathize w/ the imperial side

* * *

_[twitter thread from 5/5/19; cites[this post](http://cloggie.org/wissewords2/2018/07/02/legend-of-galactic-heroes-a-familiar-fascism/) on how LoGH falls into the trap of the "Great Man Theory":]_

plus sides of logh: it's good minus sides of logh: seemingly endless supply of nazis who think the empire is good

tbh i continue to feel that logh fails entirely in its attempt to show the downsides of fascism, and that it falls into a lot of pro-fascism traps. when i try to look for stuff related to the series i constantly see the history lesson ep touted by nazis as reflective of real life  
  
the idea that humanity indeed did fall into "decadent" and "degenerate" ways of life, exemplified by gluttony, open sexuality, etc., is classic fascist rhetoric going back to nazi germany, and pro-fascist viewers see reinhard seizing the reins not as anti-autocracy...

but as anti-degeneracy. they see reinhard as the pure aryan fascist taking out the trash, not as someone overthrowing a brutal autocracy with roots in genocide and ethnic cleansing.

and reinhard is indeed blond, blue-eyed, and portrayed as well-meaning right down to a desire to protect his pure blond blue-eyed sister from sexual exploitation by a corrupt ruling class! and the fezzani stuff... i now doubt that it was even unintentional in its anti-semitism

[http://cloggie.org/wissewords2/2018/07/02/legend-of-galactic-heroes-a-familiar-fascism/…](https://t.co/gGNW2gnFG7) i've written a few threads on it in the past, but this post also sums up a lot of what i've started to feel. logh is a good story, but deeply flawed in a lot of the imagery it invokes, and it's no mystery that anime nazis like using icons from it!

_[EDIT 7/3/19:]_

Looking at these threads again, I think I was too free about using “fascist” as a synonym for the autocratic system that the Empire becomes under Reinhard; it is true that he moves away from many of the right-wing policies of the Goldenbaum Dynasty, and fascism is right-wing by definition. Strictly speaking, the FPA is the side dealing with a surge in fascism, and the Empire’s side is more of a former fascist state that’s degraded into a classic European useless monarchy&nobles setup. However, the other determinant of fascism is a reliance on the military to police the citizens, and as a means of unifying the citizens against a common enemy. Reinhard himself doesn’t adhere to fascism politically, but for the common people, his rule offers only an _improvement in conditions_ when compared to the previous reign. His government does use the “forever-war” strategy to unify the citizens and direct dissatisfaction away from his policies, and his admirals functionally replace the entrenched nobility, most notably when Wittenfeld/Bittenfeld’s military followers need to be told to stand down to keep them from rioting in the street over their leader’s house arrest. There’s little difference here from the squabbling between aristocratic clans. (Also, Oberstein is... extremely fash, despite his own rejection of the Goldenbaum-era eugenics laws. He’s more pragmatic in his deployment of the military than someone beholden to the rhetorical ideal of a fascist government, but his end goal is sustaining the legacy of Reinhard’s rule at all costs, and his primary weapon is access to the military, and to the political elite, all of whom are intimately tied to the military.) It's the Empire, not the faceless fascist thugs of the FPA or Job Trunicht that the internet fascists seize upon.

And, fundamentally, I think the concept presented to us, of Reinhard as the brilliant ubermensch who’s uniquely skilled to transform repressive fascism into an enlightened autocracy—this is a fascist _idea_. No such person could ever exist, and entertaining the fiction that they might serves as apologism for methods that, in real life, _can only lead_ to fascism. Reinhard himself isn’t fascist per se, but he is a fascist symbol, and the aesthetics of the Empire happen align with those adored by fascists. Likewise I'm not accusing LoGH of being fascist propaganda, per se, since no reasonable person would interpret it as being anti-democracy, or supporting the policies we're shown under the Goldenbaum dynasty. (Indeed, even most of the fascists I've seen claiming it are aware that it textually condemns fascism.) I'm simply offering an explanation of why it doesn't scare them off. I believe this to be a failure in execution, not intention. Just as Tanaka and the writers of the OVA couldn't imagine a future where women are more than incidental figures in the FPA's politics and military, they didn't imagine a future where the OVA became popular on an internet message board that proceeded to spiral into full fascism***. 

Just as LGBT people can scrounge through bigoted works and find imagery and characters to reclaim, so can fascists strip away context and find admirable figures in a text that condemns fascism and supports democracy, simply because the text fails to make these authoritarian characters _entirely unlikable_ , and undesirable as totems. I reject the idea that LoGH is a work of utter perfection that transcends time in its progressive values; this is as much a fiction as the idea that a ruler like Reinhard could exist. LoGH is inherently limited by its era, and by the fact that it was written and produced by humans. (Mostly human men.) Like any story, it seeks to explain and to humanize, but wherever fiction humanizes, it can be reappropriated.

***And ultimately, despite all my explanations, this is the actual reason LoGH is used by internet fascists: it was popular on 4chan's anime board before the fascist takeover, and it makes you feel clever for liking it.


	2. On the Empire's Moral Fiber

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> note: I don't dislike anyone on the Empire side, I think they're all good characters. This is simply an evaluation of the text from a political standpoint, which is something we are _asked_ to do as viewers. My fave is Wittenfeld, who's the most gung-ho about slaughtering millions of people in the whole show, so I'm not here to act morally superior.

_[tweet thread from 6/5/18:]_  
  
my logh hot take is that reinhard is, objectively, a stupid whiny baby who deserves death and no pity

like his whole reaction to the westerland massacre...... you don't get to be pissy and short with someone calling you out on ***letting millions of people die*** because oberstein said so  
  
you're gunning for a position with inhuman levels of responsibility and you just proved yourself unworthy. you don't get a learning curve or sad feelings after ACCEPTING this kind of culpability  
  
and yes, it was an impossible choice between the nukes, and having potentially millions more people die in the war if it went on. leadership on that scale demands inhuman abilities. a smarter man might have taken the hint that the empire is an inherently evil structure   
  
but no reinhard is a pissy baby when kircheis pokes the wound, because he feels bad already!!! oberstein at least is an appropriate level of detached for the weight of his decisions. he's not out there acting like he still gets to be human

* * *

_[tweet thread from 5/5/19:]_

https://skyhopedango.tumblr.com/post/178288686626 … oh...?! reinhard is fully responsible for westerland in the novels apparently and the ova added in the bit where he then changes his mind? yeah that's a version that actually makes sense in the story lol  
  
to the point that during my rewatch i had forgotten he goes back on it, because the novel version... actually introduces tension into his character arc and fits the overall theme of political power meaning you have to get your hands dirty....  
  
and as the op here says, why would oberstein never face any consequences from reinhard, who's working on an actual coup here and needs to be able to trust his subordinates not to LET NUKES GO OFF AGAINST HIS ORDERS lol  
  
_[5/6/19:]_  
  
i'm still laughing at  
tanaka's novels: reinhard can't assume power over all of humanity without being personally responsible for the deaths of millions, if not more  
other writers: what this adapation presumes is... maybe he can?

* * *

 _[6/14/18:]_

more logh hot takes: elfriede is 100% justified in trying to murder reuenthal and she should have taken mittermeyer and the rest out as well

since it's extremely heavily implied they know oberstein is making up lichtenlade's involvement in the assassination attempt, and go along with it to get reinhard in power, resulting in her entire family being slaughtered and exiled under false pretenses

reuenthal: women were created to poison the world and betray men  
mittermeyer: agree to disagree :)

* * *

_[from a notepad file I rejected as being too shitstirr-y to post on Twitter without extensive explanation of my views on politics and fiction; note I am NOT saying this is bad writing or makes anyone involved a bad CHARACTER, it's simply a part of the series that goes completely ignored:]_

reinhard is trash post:

from episode 26, Reinhard’s response to the fact that von Lichtenlade was plotting against him (this information is ENTIRELY FALSE ACTUALLY but Reinhard is unaware of this so can't blame him for that part.... all his admirals definitely picked up on what Oberstein was saying though)  
  
  
  


then in episode 57-58, he's dealing with the mariendorfs being placed under house arrest for a relative plotting against him...

  
  
  
  


and NOW the memory of kircheis stirs him to stand up to oberstein and nobly excuse the people he likes from being put to death!

but maybe he's changed with time and come to be influenced by kircheis's tendency towards mercy--

oops no the incident comes up later (episode 75) and he shows no remorse over anything that happened! Von Lichtenlade backed him in his rise to power but lol bye dude fk you i guess. reinhard the noble and enlightened autocrat.

wow it really seems like the consequences of this came back to bite both reinhard and reuenthal in the ass, almost like the series is trying to say something about the pursuit of power.... but gosh fandom seems to think reinhard is a real swell dude so nahhh

* * *

reuenthal and mittermeyer are trash post:

  
  
  
reuenthal and mittermeyer--ALL of reinhard's admirals--pick up on the fact that oberstein's making this up. they do it anyway to consolidate reinhard's power.

  
  


it’s EXTREMELY textually explicit that these are false charges made up by oberstein to get rid of this guy; von lichtenlade has no idea what's going on, and reuenthal later outright acknowledges the conspiracy in episode 58.

  
  
mittermeyer, the nicest guy left after kircheis is gone, doesn't care in the slightest about doing this.

(reinhard wasn't there when it was made clear that oberstein is making this up, but if any of lichtenlade's male relatives were, say, 11 or 12 years old, they absolutely were slaughtered on reinhard's say-so.)

  
  
  


also mittermeyer, when he hears about the reuenthal/elfriede clusterfuck, is upset only that reuenthal has told her about the charges being false. even REUENTHAL has more sympathy for her.

  
  
  
by episode 65 mittermeyer's uhhhh forgotten about why she's pissed?? (hint: reuenthal arrested her uncle and forced him to commit suicide under false pretenses. you were helping? remember??)

  
  
  
and just wants her out of the house because she's bad for poor poor reuenthal

  
  
ten episodes later he no longer cares AT ALL and is calling her a scheming woman with no reason to be angry at reuenthal.

Are the characters deliberately written as flawed? Of course! they're not bad characters! But this is an EXPLICITLY political text through and through. It is, in its entirety, an analysis of political systems and human morality. All its characters are flawed, the point of the series is to look at their actions, good and bad, in a historical light, yet fandom largely ignores how Mittermeyer countenances Reuenthal’s misogyny and abets him and Oberstein in outright evil actions, all while every one of Reinhard's admirals bangs on and on about great and different their new regime is. To me, the fact that Reinhard's reign is predicated on the execution/exile of an entire clan means his rule is different only in scale from the previous fascist one. The eugenics may have been discarded, but the Empire is still essentially ruled by a military council. One of Reinhard's first projects is subduing the Free Planets Alliance and bringing it under imperial rule, as a means of unifying the people against an outside enemy through military means. (And keep in mind, every one of Reinhard's admirals knows that von Lichtenlade and his male relatives were executed under false pretenses.)

I think the series itself presents the Empire's side as MUCH less sympathetic than fandom believes--and this mental elision by fandom happens because the series also spends so much time humanizing Reinhard and his admirals specifically. It's hard to give this massacre, or the tragedy of Westerland, the mental weight that, to me, we were fully intended to give it. This is the constant difficulty in fiction that seeks to understand war, fascism, anything difficult: to understand its perpetrators, we have to see them as human, and once we've done that, we start to place more value on them than on anyone inconvenienced by their actions. It's just not possible to watch the whole series after Westerland thinking, "Ah, yes, there are two million people dead because of their decisions" whenever we see Reinhard or Oberstein.

But why ARE Reinhard and his admirals more worthy of understanding and exploration within the story than the people who lived on Westerland, the kind of people who are most affected by the autocracy the story is trying to examine? Well... Reinhard and the admirals are the main characters. They make things happen instead of having things happen to them. And so two million dead individuals carry less narrative weight than a small number of people who are now among the most powerful people in the universe. This just isn't a story about them. But why should autocracy ever be examined through a lens focused on the autocrats themselves? How can we, the audience, possibly come to a conclusion about a system of government if the story won't show us much of the people on the ground? To me, this is where LoGH fails like many other stories before it, in privileging the flashy elite over the reality of the poor who make up "the people"--the very ones who are being governed. Does it try to show us the common people? Yes. But there's just never enough time to show everything. Though it's made clear that in the process of seizing power, Reinhard is consumed by the system, most of this is communicated through emphasis on Reinhard himself: he loses Kircheis to one of the enemies he made in his efforts to gain power. And he doesn't just lose Kircheis, he loses Kircheis when their relationship is at its low point, following his worst moral failure.

Ultimately, Oberstein's advice is what carries him into the power he sought, but it's through listening to him that Reinhard loses Kircheis, as well as any hope of regaining an unclouded relationship with Annerose, and the ability to ever again think of himself as a blameless ruler. And yet Reinhard holds onto that power, and to Oberstein, because that's what he has left now. In his attempt to reform the system, he finds out what an autocratic system demands of those who want to rise through it, yet it's only in his final days that he even begins to think of serious structural changes beyond putting a person with good intentions at the very top. It's true that if his dream had been one of a populist revolution or something like that, it probably couldn't have stood up to the full force of a fascist state--but it's because he was born under an autocracy that the only change he can imagine is a less corrupt version of the same system. He and Oberstein both despise the Goldenbaum dynasty, yet the government they establish is one that would inevitably _become_ the Goldenbaum dynasty under any ruler except Reinhard.

The truth is that the system was so powerful and so unbalanced that when it took Annerose from Reinhard, it took her for good. There was never a way to go back to his happy, uncomplicated childhood days where nothing stood between him and his sister. His dream is that of a naive child who believes that the world can be fixed, if only he's in charge of everything. And the narrative wants us to believe that he really is impossibly brilliant and talented enough to make it happen, to some extent. At its core, this idea of the man who is indeed superior to all others--cleverer, more handsome, well-intentioned--this is a fascistic concept, and a necessary fiction to pretend that autocracy is a workable system for anyone except the autocrat. Yang has to contend with genuine problems of democracy; the Empire's main problem is that Reinhard is such a perfect ruler that no one can ever measure up. The series acknowledges that he had his flaws, but again, the main suffering we really spend time with is _Reinhard's own_. Yes, it's stated outright that the government he built could only work under him, but the fact that Reinhard _was_ this close-to-ideal ruler is the core problem. No such person ever could exist in real life, and no autocrat, self-appointed or otherwise, has ever approached the purity of Reinhard's motivations. His side of the story exists in a bubble isolated from the real world, because that's what is necessary to make autocracy look remotely fair.

The side of democracy doesn't get any such impossibly skilled person who purifies the FPA's democratic system. It gets Job Trunicht. And the FPA's side of the story presents a realistic depiction of such a person: there are no pure motivations behind his desire for power and his skill at working the system. For all the speeches we get about the virtues of democracy in contrast to autocracy, the example of autocracy we're _shown_ is playing with a stacked deck. I've spoken at length about Reinhard's shortcomings, but he's a thousand times better than any real life autocrat could ever be. And so, for all of Legend of the Galactic Heroes' attempts at showing both sides, it fails at giving us an accurate basis for the thought experiment. The Empire under Reinhard is a fantasy pitted against democracy on one of its worst possible days.


	3. Chapter 3

_[from a notepad file I'm obviously never going to bother adapting for Twitter; some hot takes™ omitted for being overly shitstirring]_

unpopular opinions logh edition

LOGH has a lot of thoughtful, timeless observations on government + war, but in many other ways it's a product of its time and should be evaluated as such. It's painfully sexist, and race is addressed in a mention that the Empire's aristocracy was created in von Goldenbaum's time out of white people with Germanic names, while in the FPA the races have all blended together and eastern/western name formats are the only remnant. (Except *both* the two black characters, Machungo and Sithole, have clearly had their names passed down from African ancestors, so one wonders about that blending). Its take on gay people is just that one Emperor who's into choirboys (who historically were prepubescent).

(and yes it is WILDLY sexist; there are a grand total of two major female characters, both of whom serve as aides and end up marrying their superior. I can't think of a woman over 40 other than Bucock's wife. There are almost no women in the military or in positions of power even in the FPA, and this is no more believable as a deliberate choice than saying the fashion and the phones are outdated on purpose. If abortion and weaponry are advanced to space-age levels, there's *no way* the women of the FPA are staying out of the workforce and military even if the Empire has somehow forcibly regressed things back to the 1800s and kept them there. The creator(s) had a blind spot, and we can't evaluate the work without accounting for that.)

-None of the other female characters in LOGH are really stunningly well-written or fleshed out. Annerose is the most central to the plot, and she's a very by the book Tragically Violated Yet Unsullied Beauty who serves as motivation for Reinhard+Kircheis. Jessica is, I'll be frank, present for about 5 seconds. (I'm NOT saying, 'they're bitches and I hate them,' I'm saying that just because they're likable doesn't mean their characters are given any attention.)

-In the same way that it's said you can't make a truly anti-war movie, I don't think LOGH succeeds in being truly anti-imperialism and anti-autocracy--and I'm not entirely sure that's its goal in the first place. It's most effective in that when it's focusing on the average people affected by the war and by the petty politicking--but nearly all the main characters are in the military or politics, and the bulk of the story is about *their* day-to-day lives and tribulations, and not the BILLIONS of people affected by each of their decisions. It's impossible to be truly anti-autocracy while centering the lives and struggles of the people making autocratic decisions.

We get a short look at the nukes taking out 2 million people, yes--but after that it's Reinhard feels bad, Kircheis is upset--which is frankly ludicrous that we're meant to even try "understanding" Reinhard in that moment as he thinks about how Kircheis isn't going to 'let this go'--TWO MILLION PEOPLE WERE JUST INCINERATED! If Kircheis genuinely wanted a "good" kaiser for the people, he'd shoot Reinhard and Oberstein to death then and there, because whether or not Oberstein would have LET them be saved, Reinhard just failed a test he cannot fail. It's a harsh judgment, yeah... but Reinhard is gunning for a position of inhuman power, and the only possible qualification is having inhuman judgment and strength. This is a responsibility, and culpability, that he chose himself. And he hesitated to save 2 million people because Oberstein said it would help him.

(In fact, since any position of power means choosing the least bad path, it would be impossible for Reinhard to avoid responsibility for, at minimum, millions of deaths. This is the entire point of the scenario, and painting Oberstein as the Big Meanie Who Made The Bad Things Happen is a huge misinterpretation of its significance. A brighter man might have taken the hint that no one human should be in charge of billions of lives.)


End file.
